Wet wipes have become a staple article of commerce in connection with their use for numerous cosmetic, personal and household applications, including use as baby wipes and the like. The packaging and dispensing of wet wipes has developed in numerous directions including portable dispensers, both hard and soft containers, and many dispensers which are available in different shapes, size and forms, both heated and unheated. In a number of these dispensers the accessiblity of the wipes themselves is not readily obtained, and in many of these applications, such as with various pop-up dispensers, even though these dispensers are designed and intended to be used for the individual removal of these wipes, the first available wet wipe tends to dry out, particularly when not subject to immediate use. This, in turn, eliminates the entire purpose of wet wipes, producing dryer, less comfortable and less efficient products.
In many cases these wet wipes are sold in containers, including both flexible and rigid containers, and the solvent or other liquid contained within the wet wipes is unevenly distributed in these containers. Thus, the wipes at the bottom of the container are far wetter than the wipes at the top of the container, and in fact in some cases users have tended to invert the containers and leave them in that condition for a period of time in order to more evenly distribute this liquid throughout the container.
In addition, in many of these wet wipe dispensers, and particularly the pop-up dispensers, although they are specifically designed so that with the removal of each wet wipe the next succeeding wet wipe will be pulled into a dispensing slot for subsequent removal, during use in many case the initial wet wipe will fall back into the container, thus creating inconvenience, and the need for manual manipulation in order to obtain the upper wet wipe and withdraw it into the dispensing slot.
The nature and variety of various wipe dispensers is, as mentioned above, quite extensive. Examples by the assignee of the present application include U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,647,506 and 5,542,568, which are only two of the many commercially important products which have been developed. These also include products with refillable dispensing systems, such as in U.S. Pat. No. 6,412,634, and systems which dispense continuous webs of material which are joined by perforations and are dispensed from a continuous roll such as those described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,578,731, and others.
There are also some instances in which dry wipe dispensers have been designed for downward removal of an initial wipe from a vertically disposed wipe dispenser kit. Thus, the product shown in U.S. Pat. No. 6,585,130 is mounted by means of a hook attached to an outside surface. However, the product shown in this patent is specifically designed for the dispensing of dry wipe products, and the wipes are not arranged to be separately removed through a dispensing slot. To the contrary, they are specifically arranged for grasping by the user in order to effectuate each separate removal step. Also, this device is not removably or temporarily mountable upon a surface for the ready removal of individual wipes therefrom, and in fact the bottom surface includes the slot for wipe removal and therefore could not possibly be mounted on a surface selected by the user.
In addition, there are a number of heated wipe dispensers which are known in the art in which the wipes are separately removed in an upward direction from the top of a dispenser. For example, Japanese Patent No. JP 8-11737 (see FIG. 13 of U.S. Pat. No. 6,331,696) discloses a prepackaged wet tissue warming apparatus with electrical heating elements heating the wet tissues closest to the dispensing surface so as to provide for those tissues to be heated more thoroughly than those further from the dispensing surface. The surface also includes a cover which can be opened to remove the wet tissues and means for aiding in dispensing by utilizing coil springs to exert pressure upon the plate supporting the wet tissues.
There are many other configurations of wet wipes and the like which are disposed in a heated dispenser for upward removal in the prior art. These include, for example, the aforementioned U.S. Pat. No. 6,331,696, disclosing a device for warming prepackaged pre-wetted towels including a coil spring shown in FIG. 2 thereof to aid in dispensing. Also, U.S. Pat. No. 4,694,973 uses light bulbs as the heating element therein, and U.S. Pat. No. 5,210,396 discloses a baby wipes warmer apparatus which includes a container assembly to receive a box of baby wipes and a heater assembly with an electrical heating element with preselected heating conditions.
The search has thus continued for a more convenient and efficient dispenser for wet wipes which can not only provide a free-standing dispenser which is readily usable for individual selective removal of wet wipes when mounted on a surface selected by the user, but which also maintains these wet wipes in a configuration which keeps the leading wet wipe for removal in a wet or moist condition while permitting such ready removal, and which in a preferred embodiment also provides for heating the wet wipes as they are removed from the container, which is also preferably one which can be refilled in a simple manner.